If Helen was secretly disgusted by all the elaborate preparations for
her wedding she disguised her feelings with considerable skill, and
took part quite naturally, in endless discussions on trousseaux, red
carpets and white satin. Both her mother and Geoffrey's mother were
delighted at her unlooked-for docility, and Mrs. Guest admitted quite
frankly to Mrs. Greene that Helen's engagement was having a very
settling effect on her; to which Mrs. Greene replied firmly:
"Dear Helen. We all expect so much of her that I'm sure it makes her
try to live up to our ideals."
There was a slight uneasiness in the air on the evening when Mrs.
Greene asked brightly:
"And where are you two thinking of for your honeymoon?"
Helen looked up from some patterns of shot silk that she was
considering.
"Oh, the Hague I think," she said casually. "There are some moderns
there that I rather want to see, and some quite good old stuff too, I
believe."
"Oh really. Yes, that would be very nice I suppose. But of course
it's a big town. Don't you think Geoffrey would be happier among
beautiful scenery? The Italian lakes, perhaps, or mountains if you
want to be energetic."
"I don't know, I'm sure." Helen shrugged her shoulders. "Would you
be happier with scenery, Geoffrey?"
"I think I'd like the Hague," he said. "For a week or so, anyhow,
and then we can move on."
"You know, dear," said Mrs. Greene reasonably, "your interest in
pictures is a very specialised thing. You mustn't expect Geoffrey to
feel quite as you do about them. I don't think he knows very much
about art."
Helen's face was grim.
"He doesn't," she answered, "but he'll learn." And her mouth shut
ominously.
Mrs. Greene got up discreetly and murmuring something about dressing
for dinner, went upstairs.
"Darling," said Geoffrey. "Mother thinks we are now about to quarrel
fiercely, but we aren't, are we?"
"Of course not. I don't mind your not knowing anything about
painting so long as you don't mind my concentrating on it a good
deal."
"You know I don't. Tell me, Helen, is all this business driving you
to frenzy?"
"No, not a bit. I think it's frightfully obscene, dressing up in
white satin and being handed over to you at a given moment, but I can
easily cope with it. Isn't there something about 'straining at a
gnat and swallowing a camel'?"
"And I'm the camel," said Geoffrey sullenly.
"Yes, you are," Helen answered calmly. "And you understand the
position perfectly well. You know I am marrying you quite
reluctantly for the simple reason that I love you to distraction."
Geoffrey's face cleared.
"I am a fool," he said. "It's quite all right, Helen, and you're
being marvellously good about all this sickening detail."
Helen shook her head.
"It's your mother who's marvellous," she said. "She really is a
masterpiece. I've never seen anything so well done as her pose. She
is so affectionate and maternal that anyone would think she was
delighted with me. In fact she's almost coy, and yet she can't help
disapproving of almost everything I say or do."
"No, that isn't true; she's approved of you quite a lot lately."
"Oh well, perhaps she has, but only because I have given way about
all sorts of conventional details that go quite against the grain
with me."
"Why have you, darling," Geoffrey asked curiously.
"Well, she swallowed me so magnificently in the first place that I
felt I had to help to bolster up her attitude. It would be rather
pathetic really, if she knew we understood her so well. She is a
person who needs to be wrapped in the illusion of success."
"It's kind of you to feel like that, I think, though it would kill
her to realise that you knew so much about her that you were simply
being decent to her."
"Anyhow it's only a few more weeks now."
"Six weeks and three days, my dearest, and after that we won't see
much of them and everything will go quite smoothly."
"Oh, no, it won't, Geoffrey," Helen's eyes flickered dangerously, "it
won't go the least smoothly, it will be up and down like a very rough
crossing, but perfectly lovely all the same."
"Dear heart, I'm sure of that; if only I can keep you happy."
"You needn't have any doubts, Geoffrey. I'm perfectly certain that
fundamentally we're right for each other."
The next few years proved the truth of Helen's words. Their
honeymoon was exhausting, awkward, and ecstatic but not, they
decided, more exhausting and awkward than other people's honeymoons,
and on the other hand, certainly more ecstatic.
"It's odd how you stimulate me mentally," said Helen a little while
after they got home to the house in Cheyne Walk which Mrs. Rodney so
often referred as "very bright of course, but rather too bizarre for
my taste."
"I don't think it is odd," contradicted Geoffrey, "ever since we met
we've acted as mutual goads to each other."
"Yes I know," Helen answered impatiently, "but it was different
before we were married. Really you know, I didn't do any decent work
between getting to know you and now. You remember that poster I was
so pleased with? Well it's quite awful. I was on the wrong tack
altogether but now I do know what I'm about, I entirely understand
about the unity of angles."
"You don't suggest, do you, that I'm responsible for enlarging your
comprehension of angles?" asked Geoffrey laughing.
"No of course not; you hadn't anything to do with it. I only mean
that I'm very clear and free in my mind just now, and that is partly
because of you. You don't hinder me at all, you help me."
"I'm glad," said Geoffrey, "keep free if you can; there's no need to
get in a mess with things."
"I certainly won't." Helen was emphatic. "I know your wretched aunt
and all sorts of people expect to be asked here just because I'm
newly married and have a new house, but I simply won't do it. And
I'm not going to pay any calls either."
"I don't want you to do things like that. Lavinia does it plenty
enough for one family, and Hugh's wife, when he has one, is sure to
be a model of propriety. But I want you to go on being Helen Guest
even if you are Mrs. Geoffrey Greene. Don't fuss about my family."
"You do understand remarkably well, Geoffrey. I'd have to go my own
way in any case, but I'm terribly glad you're with me in my policy of
being ruthless."
By means of keeping to this policy of ruthlessness life went happily
for the young Geoffrey Greenes. There was a period of stress and
strain in the second year of their marriage when Helen decided that a
frankly futurist style was the only one in which she could express
herself sincerely. Her first attempts were almost ludicrously
unsuccessful, and Geoffrey was so rash as to burst out laughing as he
looked at a canvas in which a large purple cylinder placed on a still
larger purple cylinder, and surmounted by a smaller cylinder of
shrimp pink faintly spotted, was entitled simply "Country woman."
Helen looked at him coldly.
"Aren't you being a little crude, Geoffrey?" she asked.
"Don't mislay your sense of humour, I do implore you," he urged still
laughing, "I expect this is a very important picture, but to the
uninitiated eye it's very funny."
"That's just the trouble, Geoffrey. You are uninitiated--almost
painfully so. I've been feeling out of sympathy with you for some
time. I'm prepared to agree with you that this is bad work, though
the idea is perfectly sound, but I think it's bad because of you.
I'm being clogged by marriage, it's hampering me appallingly."
"You're working yourself up, Helen," said Geoffrey curtly, "I refuse
to be made responsible because you do bad work."
"I'm sorry." Helen's voice was hard. "But the fact remains that
indirectly you are responsible. Marriage is not conducive to good
work, and I've decided to cut it out for a time anyhow. I'm quite
contented to go on living in this house if you will arrange to sleep
in your dressing-room and leave me entirely unmolested."
"You're unpardonable. I don't know how you dare use a word like that
about me."
"I'll apologise for it if you like, it wasn't the word I meant. But
I wish to be quite free and not be expected to sleep with you again."
"Certainly," Geoffrey agreed stiffly, "that is for you to decide."
Their reconciliation a few weeks later was disproportionately
trivial. Helen's futurist fever had burned itself out, and she was
temporarily high and dry without any interest in art.
Geoffrey came into her studio one night to find her looking ruefully
at "Country Woman." She went up to him and kissed him.
"I've been a bloody fool, Geoffrey darling, I'm terribly sorry. You
were quite right; it really is a ghastly picture. Let's burn it now."
"You've been awful," said Geoffrey, but his voice was kind.
"I know I have, but I swear I never will again. Come on, let's burn
it."
Childishly they cut the canvas into strips, crumpled it up, and
crammed it into the fire, and as Helen quoted happily "if thine eye
offend thee pluck it out" the last traces of Geoffrey's resentment
melted and he held her to him with a passion intensified by the past
weeks of restraint. No quarrel marked the end of her next phase,
which was a return to the impressionist style of her pre-marriage
period.
"It's no good," she proclaimed dismally, "I'm doing rotten work."
"I hope you're not going to blame me and marriage this time?" asked
Geoffrey, with a faint accent of anxiety under his light manner.
Helen smiled at him frankly.
"Good God, no," she said, "I know better now. I've got you perfectly
in place, Geoffrey. You're the one absolutely necessary thing in my
life that I shall probably always stick to. All this stuff," she
waved an airy hand round the studio, "is variable, if you know what I
mean. I can't do without it, but it changes. Heaven knows it's bad
enough now, but sometime I'm going to do something good."
"Do you mean you've arranged your life in compartments, with me in
one and your painting in another, and so on?"
"No I don't mean that. I did try it at one time, but it was
hopeless. When I got mad with my painting, my rage overlapped out of
the painting compartment into yours. But now it's different; you're
separate from everything and yet at the bottom of everything. I
can't explain quite what I mean, but it works all right."
"Darling, do you mean that in your mind I'm independent of the other
things you care about, but in a way they are dependent on me?"
"Yes, I think that's it. Anyhow I'm happy."
"So am I, Helen, really frightfully happy."
"And what's more Geoffrey I think I'll probably be able to fit a
child in too."
"Do you mean that you want one? Don't do it for me; I'm perfectly
satisfied with things as they are."
Helen came over and sat beside Geoffrey on the sofa, leaning back in
her corner and gazing at the fire. She was silent for a few minutes,
and Geoffrey looking at the firelight playing over her bright hair
wondered vaguely what she was thinking.
"I don't think I specially want one," she said at last, "at least if
I do it's for pure idiotic sentimental reasons. But on the other
hand I'm not sure that I won't paint better after I've had one; you
can't be certain really that every possible experience isn't all to
the good."
"I think probably it is," agreed Geoffrey, "Of course I like you to
want one for idiotic sentimental reasons; it makes me feel surer of
you; but quite apart from that there is your painting. I know you're
depressed about it just now and it might start you off working again
if you had a child."
"Geoffrey, you're rather sweet to me," said Helen impulsively, "I
think it's touching of you to understand that having a baby might
make me paint better. It's a topsy turvy idea I know, but I can't
help seeing it in that way."
"Sometime I suppose you'll get used to my being able to see things
from your point of view," said Geoffrey contentedly.
Helen lifted his hand and kissed it.
"I don't think I'll get too used to you, darling," she said, "I
really love you very much."
The telephone rang in the hall before Geoffrey could answer her.
"Damn," she said getting up lazily, "I'm sure that's your mother, she
always rings up at this time of night because she feels sure of
getting us both at once."
She shut the door, and the one-sided conversation was too subdued to
interrupt Geoffrey's thoughts. They were entirely pleasant. His
marriage satisfied him mentally and delighted him physically. His
occasional fierce quarrels with Helen seemed mere surface
disturbances; they did not affect in the slightest their mutual love,
though they undoubtedly eradicated in Geoffrey any tendency towards
complacency.
He lay stretched out luxuriously on the sofa, and looking back, found
that the storms and agonies that had preceded his engagement were dim
in his memory. They belonged to a stage that was definitely over.
Helen came back into the studio, her eyes dancing.
"You needn't tell me," said Geoffrey, "I can see by your face that
you've been talking to mother. What's she done now?"
"Oh, Geoffrey, it really is gorgeous. She's got the most perfect
idea. You know Hugh and Jessica are coming back on Tuesday? Well,
she proposes to have a party the Friday after for your grannie and
great-aunt Sarah and aunt Dora and Jessica and me. All six of us do
you see? And such husbands as there are, naturally."
"It sounds monstrous. Must we go?"
"Of course we must, and it isn't monstrous at all. I do wish you
appreciated your mother; she'll be at her best stage-managing a thing
like that. It will be a perfect puppet show; she'll pull the wires
and we'll dance."
"Darling, why do you dance? Is it pure malice?"
"No it isn't. A little bit, yes. I do love to see how far she'll
go. When we talk about art, for instance, I give her cues to see if
she'll take them, and she does every time. Out she trots the same
old clichés; it never fails. But mostly it's because I really admire
her; she's so consistently unreal, she isn't a person at all, she's a
peg hung with old worn out conventions and traditions, and yet she
comports herself as if she were more real than any one else in the
world."
"I'm her son; am I unreal too?" Geoffrey asked soberly.
"My darling, you're not."
Helen stood away from him, looking down at him serenely, her hands
clasped loosely in front of her, her manner serious.
"You're real to me, just as I expect she and your father are real to
each other. I'm an individualist. I suppose I'm what people would
call temperamental, but I'm not entirely imbecile. I appreciate
quite clearly that I have an enormous lot in common with your mother.
As regards the ordinary practical things of life we do just the same
as your parents did. I don't mean only things like marrying, and
having children, and dying. But we're the product of the same
education and very much the same kind of home. We have the same
income, and move in much the same set. The differences between us
are mainly superficial and illusionary. Your mother, for instance,
has an illusion about motherhood and all that, and I have one about
art, but we're both in the tradition of suitable wives for the male
Greene."
"It _is_ odd to hear you talk like that. I should have thought that
you would have passionately repudiated any sort of kinship with
mother. And surely the differences between people are very sharp?
Whatever you may say, you're very distinct from other people."
"Not now," said Helen positively. "When I was very young, yes, and
when I'm old then I'll be Helen Guest again, but now I'm just
beginning on the middle years and your mother's just getting to the
end of them, but we've all the experiences of life in common, even if
we do approach them from a totally different stand-point."
"I see what you mean. But you won't change will you, Helen? You
won't be less yourself if you have a baby?"
"Yes, I think I'll change; I don't think I'll be less myself but
anyhow you'll have to risk that."
"I don't want you any different," said Geoffrey very quietly.
Helen threw back her head and laughed.
"You don't know," she said, "I may become too awful, or I may improve
enormously; the only single certain thing is that within the next
year or two I'm going to do some good work."
"You're like mother in one way anyhow: in your brutally
uncompromising optimism."
"And in another way too," Helen countered swiftly, "that I do most
genuinely love one of the Mr. Greenes."